Friday, March 10, 2017

"I don’t have an opening in
my OD team now. But, you can join our recruitment team and do recruitment
in the OD way”, I heard the Senior HR Leader telling a candidate who was
hell-bent on joining the OD team. This was my fifth ‘encounter’ with this
gentleman (See 'Passion for work and anasakti
‘, 'Appropriate metaphors for
organizational commitment ‘ ,‘To name or not to name, that is the
question’ and ‘A Mathematical approach to HR’
for the outcomes of my previous interactions with him).I was a bit taken aback
by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind of ‘solutions’ will end
in tears or worse. However, similar to what had happened during my previous
encounters with him, this interaction forced me to think a bit more deeply
about the underlying issue - the application of OD(Organization
Development) to the various functional areas in HR (Human Resource
Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this series of posts on
'The OD Quest' where we will look at the possibilities that
arise when OD ventures into other parts of the people management
terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a
cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD)
domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and
also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In
the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we
made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to
Recruitment. In this post, let’s take our OD Quest to one of OD’s closest neighbors
– Learning & Development (L&D) also known as ‘Training’ (though the
term ‘Training’ is becoming increasingly unfashionable especially for behavioral training)

OD and L&D (as opposed to
OD and Recruitment) are often considered
to be siblings or even twins. In some of the organizations they also live in the same house (function)
called 'Learning & OD'. When OD becomes more like OE/Organization Effectiveness that focuses more on the 'structural' dimension (e.g. Organization structure, job design, congruence of structural elements, workforce planning etc.) as opposed to the 'human process' dimension
and/or when L&D is clubbed with Technical/Functional Training, they are more likely to
live apart, in terms of the boxes and arrows in the organization chart, often with unfortunate consequences!

When it comes to the nature of
work, the boundary between OD and L&;D is not often clearly defined (and it
varies significantly across organizations). Typically, individual level
capability building is considered to be in the L&;D land and group and
organization level capability building is considered to be in the OD land. ‘Coaching’
is a hotly disputed territory between OD and L&D. Territorial disputes
also erupt when it comes to ‘change
management’/’mindset/culture change’ kind of training.

To me, the separation between OD and
L&D is arbitrary and counterproductive. Learning’ is defined as ‘sustainable
change in behavior’ and OD is about ‘facilitating change’. So, it is very
difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. This is even more true these days when L&D has moved away from being primarily 'event-driven' and OD has moved away from 'conducting isolated ('hit and run')interventions'. Efforts to force a
separation between the two often leads to 'things falling through the cracks'. More
importantly, this can adversely affect the mutual value addition.

Let’s look at an example. One of the serious ‘crimes’ committed in the
L&D land is that of ‘Training the victim’ where problems at the strategy/structure/process/culture
levels are conveniently misdiagnosed as ‘capability issues’ and employees are sent
for remedial training to fix their capability gaps (see ‘Training the victim’
for details)!

A closer partnership between L&D and OD can improve the
quality of the diagnosis/need identification and also help in better change
management to sustain the ‘change in behavior’ and ‘transfer of learning’ as the
OD function often brings in excellent diagnosis and consulting skills. Also ,OD
can help a lot in terms of structuring the 70% (on the job learning) part of
the 70:20:10 learning model (see ‘Truths stretched too far’ for more details). Again, ‘Leadership Training’ often degenerates
into some sort of ‘Corporate Rain Dance’ (see 'Leadership Training and Corporate Rain Dance' for details). Partnership with OD can
help in addressing this also.

Similarly, large scale OD interventions often involve a lot of
capability building where L&D can help. Again the L&D function often
brings in significant program management capability that can be leveraged to enhance
the effectiveness of the roll out of change management initiatives.

A closer partnership between L&D and OD also ensures that
high impact domains like ‘coaching’ don’t fall through
the cracks and that they are effectively addressed. Another key area where the
collaboration between OD and L&D can add a lot of value is in enabling
employees to transition from one responsibility level to another responsibility
level that requires a different mindset in addition to a different skillset
(See ‘Accelerated learning & Rites of passage’ for a related discussion).

So where does this leave us? OD and L&D can add a lot of
value to each other. This works best when their ‘natural affinity’ (in terms of
nature of work) is maintained in terms of organization structure. Hence an HR
organization structure that combines the L&D and OD functions into ‘Learning
&OD’ is much more likely to be impactful. This also facilitates better
crosspollination of skillsets and a more integrated perspective!Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR land?!

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About this blog

This blog is an attempt to arrive at the simplicity that is achieved by working through/wrestling with the complexities in life and work. While most of the posts here are on topics on which I have some sort of expertise, some of the posts might reflect a tendency to 'rush in where angels fear to tread'! There could also be cases similar to that of an 'n' dimensional 'animal' trying to swallow an 'n+m' dimensional object. The views expressed here are my own and they don't necessarily reflect the views of my employers (past, present or future!).

About Me

Life at the intersection of theory and practice. Exploring the paradoxes and possibilities in Human Resources, Organization Development and Personal Effectiveness - using stories, myths and concepts from a wide range of fields